Visualization of segmented cardiac anatomy with accelerated rendering method

Volume rendering of 3D anatomical and medical data would be valuable in medical diagnosis and surgical planning. In this paper, we investigated the visualization of the segmented heart obtained by the cross-sectional data from the Visible Human Project, and proposed an accelerated rendering method to speed up the original ray-casting rendering method. To provide a satisfactory visualization quality on the shape and boundary of cardiac tissues, we designed the transfer function and assigned an appreciate opacity and color value for each kind of tissue. In interactive visualization, we adopt the ray casting algorithm of volume rendering and modify it to accelerate the rendering speed. We also provide the fundamental rotation and zooming operations in the visualization platform, and further implement an interface to display three regular views of the volume data. Furthermore, a clipping plane tool is provided to crop the heart at arbitrary point of view.